On the morning of March 23, 1849, a wooden box was loaded onto a wagon in Richmond, Virginia. It was an ordinary-looking package, roughly three feet long and two feet wide, with air holes bored into its sides. Inside, folded into a cramped space with barely enough room to move, was a man who had decided to risk everything for freedom.

His name was Henry Brown. He was enslaved, and he had devised a plan so extraordinary that it would eventually earn him the nickname by which history remembers him: Henry “Box” Brown.

The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a lithograph by Samuel Rowse (published in 1850).